(A somewhat briefer version of this piece appeared last week at TIME.COM on MLK Day, on which date, its author was actually giving a talk on Robert E. Lee to a wonderful audience at Washington & Lee. Go figure the odds on that. Confirmed masochists may view the video of the talk here, beginning about 19 minutes in.)

The Auburn Avenue neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., was born in January 1929 was both a spatial and human embodiment of
Atlanta's paradoxical reputation for both strict racial segregation and black
economic success. Noted journalist and renowned apostle of the "New South," Henry
W. Grady, may have strained the credulity of his New York audience in 1886 when he insisted that he bore no resentment
toward his beloved Atlanta's arch-nemesis, General William Tecumseh Sherman, but
Grady's claim that "from the ashes he left us... we have raised a
brave and beautiful city" was more than the idle boast of a shameless booster. Atlanta's
speedily restored railroad connections and postbellum emergence as the Southeast's
principal trade and transportation hub all but assured its magnetic allure. By
1900 it was home to 90,000 people, more than a third of whom were black. A
bloody race riot in 1906 left at least a dozen and quite likely more black
Atlantans dead, yet--with the city's "Forward Atlanta," crusade for economic
growth proceeding apace--the city's black population continued to swell. It
stood at 90,000 by the time King was born into a well-established black middle
class of merchants, lawyers, educators (the city boasted six private black
colleges well before 1900) and ministers, concentrated in the city's West Side
on and around Auburn Avenue, which a prominent resident once called "the
richest Negro street in the world."

If Atlanta had established a
reputation as a relative mecca of upward mobility for black Georgians looking
to better themselves materially, it had proven no less a font of opportunity
for those of a more spiritual bent, including the infant King's father and
maternal grandfather, both of whom had been born into sharecropping families in
nearby rural counties. Martin (né Michael) Luther King, Sr., had arrived in
Atlanta as an aspiring, though scarcely literate, young minister in 1918. His
determined efforts to improve himself and his circumstances did not suffer in
the least from his fortuitous marriage to Alberta Williams, whose own father's meager
rural origins had not prevented him from building his small congregation into
the powerful Ebenezer Baptist Church, where, upon his death in 1931, he would
be succeeded in the pulpit by his son-in-law.

Growing up, the younger Martin's
solidly middle-class background offered some insulation from brutalities of the
Jim Crow system, but there were no guarantees. Scarcely a year after King was
born, Dennis Hubert, a sophomore at Morehouse College and also the son of a
prominent black minister, was brutally murdered for allegedly insulting two
young white women. For all this atrocity said about the limitations of middle-class
standing for the city's blacks, the young man's white killers were arrested,
convicted and sentenced to prison, an outcome highly unlikely, to say the
least, in any rural county anywhere in the state at that point.

It was not
surprising that a historian of that era found Atlanta "quite evidently not
proud of Georgia" or that, across the state, all but a very few whites heartily
reciprocated the sentiment. Indeed, this was the primary reason that Georgia's
overwhelming rural legislative majority had taken formal action in 1917 to
quarantine the capital city's insidious racial and political moderation. This
was accomplished through the brazenly anti-urban artifice of the "county-unit" electoral
system, which effectively guaranteed that the preferences of voters in Atlanta,
population 270,000 in 1930, could be neutralized completely by those of voters
in the state's three smallest counties, which had a combined population of
scarcely 10,000.

This was a situation tailor-made
for a rustic, race-baiting demagogue like Eugene Talmadge. Peppering his
speeches with the "n-word," stonewalling efforts to improve the schools, and
reveling in the impotent rebukes of "them lying Atlanta newspapers," Talmadge claimed
the governorship for the first of four times in 1932. For all he might have
done to impede progress across the state as a whole, however, Talmadge's impact
on Atlanta itself was notably less severe. Despite the economic reversals of
the Great Depression, the infusions of cash from a variety of New Deal programs
had already paid off for Atlantans by the end of the 1930s, with a greatly
expanded and modernized infrastructure and dramatic improvement in schools,
hospitals and other public institutions.

The overpowering urge to show the
world that Atlanta was back and better than ever was more than apparent in
December 1939 when the film version of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Windpremiered at the
Loew's Grand Theater. In keeping with the city's now well-known penchant
for self-promotion, PR-savvy Mayor William B. Hartsfield spared no exertion to
assure a glittery Hollywood presence for the event including, of course, Clark
Gable, Vivien Leigh and the film's other white actors. Fearing repercussions
from local whites, however, he extended no such hospitality to Hattie McDaniel,
Butterfly McQueen or other black cast members. In the end, the only black
participants of note in the entire affair were the members of the choir at the
Ebenezer Baptist Church, including the son of its pastor. Just shy of his 10th birthday,
Martin King sang along as, in keeping with the film's blatant racial
stereotyping, the group, dressed as slaves, performed spirituals for an
all-white audience at a Junior League charity gala.

King and Hartsfield would cross
paths frequently in the years to come. Under Hartsfield's leadership, Atlanta
would leave a racially fraught Birmingham, Ala., in its dust as it rode the
crest of World War II economic expansion to undisputed preeminence as the
South's most dynamic city. Steadily changing with the times, the popular and
uber-connected Hartsfield would draw on his gift for orchestration again and
again as he presided over the desegregation of downtown businesses and the city's
tiny but notably uneventful first steps toward integrating its public schools.
Meanwhile, returned to share Ebenezer's bully pulpit with his father, the
younger Rev. King began to cast doubt on the mayor's vaunted claim that his
city was "too busy to hate" by consistently pushing the envelope of social change
further and faster than Hartsfield had envisioned. This not only made King a
sometimes troublesome presence for the image-obsessed Hartsfield, but vice
versa, as the mayor's moderating interventions in conflicts over King's
protests may have forestalled some of the uglier racial confrontations that
ultimately served King's purposes best.

Atlanta had found its breezy,
boosterist persona in the artful and charming Hartsfield. It would be slower,
however, to acknowledge as its conscience the 1964 Nobel Laureate who, the day
after returning from Oslo, immediately antagonized the local business
establishment by venturing scarcely two blocks from his church to join workers
picketing for better wages at the city's Scripto Pen Company. Not surprisingly,
Hartsfield joined his mayoral successor, Ivan Allen, Jr., in a frantic effort to
persuade key white business leaders whose
feathers King had just ruffled that, lest the world see their city as reluctant
to embrace its globally acclaimed native son, they must, however grudgingly, lend their high-profile
presence to an upcoming gala celebrating his achievement. Sure enough, among the
1,500 people in attendance on the appointed evening were several members of the local
business elite, including none other than James V. Carmichael, the president of
Scripto Pen. Ironically, but surely fittingly as well, some 30 years later, his
plant's remains would be bulldozed in order to provide parking for visitors to
the city's Martin Luther King, Jr., Historic District.

(A somewhat briefer version of this piece appeared last week at TIME.COM on MLK Day, at which point, its author was giving a talk on Robert E. Lee to a wonderful audience at Washington & Lee. Go figure the odds on that. Confirmed masochists may view the video of the talk here, beginning about 19 minutes in.)

The Auburn Avenue neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr., was born in January 1929 was both a spatial and human embodiment of
Atlanta's paradoxical reputation for both strict racial segregation and black
economic success. Noted journalist and renowned apostle of the "New South," Henry
W. Grady, may have strained the credulity of his New York audience in 1886 when he insisted that he bore no resentment
toward his beloved Atlanta's arch-nemesis, General William Tecumseh Sherman, but
Grady's claim that "from the ashes he left us... we have raised a
brave and beautiful city" was more than the idle boast of a shameless booster. Atlanta's
speedily restored railroad connections and postbellum emergence as the Southeast's
principal trade and transportation hub all but assured its magnetic allure. By
1900 it was home to 90,000 people, more than a third of whom were black. A
bloody race riot in 1906 left at least a dozen and quite likely more black
Atlantans dead, yet--with the city's "Forward Atlanta," crusade for economic
growth proceeding apace--the city's black population continued to swell. It
stood at 90,000 by the time King was born into a well-established black middle
class of merchants, lawyers, educators (the city boasted six private black
colleges well before 1900) and ministers, concentrated in the city's West Side
on and around Auburn Avenue, which a prominent resident once called "the
richest Negro street in the world."

If Atlanta had established a
reputation as a relative mecca of upward mobility for black Georgians looking
to better themselves materially, it had proven no less a font of opportunity
for those of a more spiritual bent, including the infant King's father and
maternal grandfather, both of whom had been born into sharecropping families in
nearby rural counties. Martin (né Michael) Luther King, Sr., had arrived in
Atlanta as an aspiring, though scarcely literate, young minister in 1918. His
determined efforts to improve himself and his circumstances did not suffer in
the least from his fortuitous marriage to Alberta Williams, whose own father's meager
rural origins had not prevented him from building his small congregation into
the powerful Ebenezer Baptist Church, where, upon his death in 1931, he would
be succeeded in the pulpit by his son-in-law.

Growing up, the younger Martin's
solidly middle-class background offered some insulation from brutalities of the
Jim Crow system, but there were no guarantees. Scarcely a year after King was
born, Dennis Hubert, a sophomore at Morehouse College and also the son of a
prominent black minister, was brutally murdered for allegedly insulting two
young white women. For all this atrocity said about the limitations of middle-class
standing for the city's blacks, the young man's white killers were arrested,
convicted and sentenced to prison, an outcome highly unlikely, to say the
least, in any rural county anywhere in the state at that point.

It was not
surprising that a historian of that era found Atlanta "quite evidently not
proud of Georgia" or that, across the state, all but a very few whites heartily
reciprocated the sentiment. Indeed, this was the primary reason that Georgia's
overwhelming rural legislative majority had taken formal action in 1917 to
quarantine the capital city's insidious racial and political moderation. This
was accomplished through the brazenly anti-urban artifice of the "county-unit" electoral
system, which effectively guaranteed that the preferences of voters in Atlanta,
population 270,000 in 1930, could be neutralized completely by those of voters
in the state's three smallest counties, which had a combined population of
scarcely 10,000.

This was a situation tailor-made
for a rustic, race-baiting demagogue like Eugene Talmadge. Peppering his
speeches with the "n-word," stonewalling efforts to improve the schools, and
reveling in the impotent rebukes of "them lying Atlanta newspapers," Talmadge claimed
the governorship for the first of four times in 1932. For all he might have
done to impede progress across the state as a whole, however, Talmadge's impact
on Atlanta itself was notably less severe. Despite the economic reversals of
the Great Depression, the infusions of cash from a variety of New Deal programs
had already paid off for Atlantans by the end of the 1930s, with a greatly
expanded and modernized infrastructure and dramatic improvement in schools,
hospitals and other public institutions.

The overpowering urge to show the
world that Atlanta was back and better than ever was more than apparent in
December 1939 when the film version of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Windpremiered at the
Loew's Grand Theater. In keeping with the city's now well-known penchant
for self-promotion, PR-savvy Mayor William B. Hartsfield spared no exertion to
assure a glittery Hollywood presence for the event including, of course, Clark
Gable, Vivien Leigh and the film's other white actors. Fearing repercussions
from local whites, however, he extended no such hospitality to Hattie McDaniel,
Butterfly McQueen or other black cast members. In the end, the only black
participants of note in the entire affair were the members of the choir at the
Ebenezer Baptist Church, including the son of its pastor. Just shy of his 10th birthday,
Martin King sang along as, in keeping with the film's blatant racial
stereotyping, the group, dressed as slaves, performed spirituals for an
all-white audience at a Junior League charity gala.

King and Hartsfield would cross
paths frequently in the years to come. Under Hartsfield's leadership, Atlanta
would leave a racially fraught Birmingham, Ala., in its dust as it rode the
crest of World War II economic expansion to undisputed preeminence as the
South's most dynamic city. Steadily changing with the times, the popular and
uber-connected Hartsfield would draw on his gift for orchestration again and
again as he presided over the desegregation of downtown businesses and the city's
tiny but notably uneventful first steps toward integrating its public schools.
Meanwhile, returned to share Ebenezer's bully pulpit with his father, the
younger Rev. King began to cast doubt on the mayor's vaunted claim that his
city was "too busy to hate" by consistently pushing the envelope of social change
further and faster than Hartsfield had envisioned. This not only made King a
sometimes troublesome presence for the image-obsessed Hartsfield, but vice
versa, as the mayor's moderating interventions in conflicts over King's
protests may have forestalled some of the uglier racial confrontations that
ultimately served King's purposes best.

Atlanta had found its breezy,
boosterist persona in the artful and charming Hartsfield. It would be slower,
however, to acknowledge as its conscience the 1964 Nobel Laureate who, the day
after returning from Oslo, forfeited the acclaim of the local business
establishment by venturing scarcely two blocks from his church to join workers
picketing for better wages at the city's Scripto Pen Company. Not surprisingly,
Hartsfield joined his mayoral successor, Ivan Allen, Jr., in a frantic effort to
persuade key white business leaders whose
feathers King had just ruffled that, lest the world see their city as reluctant
to embrace its globally acclaimed native son, they must lend their high-profile
presence to an upcoming gala celebrating his achievement. Sure enough, among the
1,500 people in attendance that evening were several members of the local
business elite, including none other than James V. Carmichael, the president of
Scripto Pen. Ironically, but surely fittingly as well, some 30 years later, his
plant's remains would be bulldozed in order to provide parking for visitors to
the city's Martin Luther King, Jr., Historic District.

The
excitement and acclaim that greeted both the Peachtree and the Broadway
premieres of producer David O. Selznick's adaptation of Gone With the Wind just before Christmas seventy-five years ago
seems genuinely cringe-worthy today, after multiple indictments over recent
years of Margaret Mitchell's novel as racist and historically distorted. Mitchell
is clearly culpable on the first count, although by no means uniquely so, but
latter-day critics who charge her with distorting history would be well advised
to consider the history she had to work with and, in some aspects, even
undertook to revise.

Released in mid-summer 1936, Mitchell's
book had already sold more than a million copies in the U.S. alone by January,
1937. Rather than disappoint a multitude of adoring readers poring obsessively
over their favorite lines, the screen writers ultimately opted for scrupulous
fidelity to Mitchell's text. Yet, the film's opening credits, introducing it as
"Margaret Mitchell's Story of the Old South," were more applicable to its
dialogue than to some of the actual meanings Mitchell meant to convey. This
much was clear to Mitchell and her more thoughtful readers--even before the
first scene--in the scrolled lines setting the story in "a land of Cavaliers and
cotton " where "the Age of Chivalry took its last bow." Mitchell took great
exception to this spin on her story that, she consistently maintained, was
actually intended to insert some historical realism in an Old South narrative
long shrouded in fluttery romanticism. "I certainly had no intention of writing
about Cavaliers," she insisted, pointing out that "practically all my
characters, except the Virginia Wilkeses, were of sturdy yeoman stock."

Mitchell's words certainly rang
true in her depiction of prominent planter Gerald O'Hara as a semi-literate "bogtrotter"
who fled his native Ireland under suspicion for the murder of an English rent
collector. "Loud-mouthed and blustering," Mitchell's Gerald proceeds to parlay
his facility at poker and his "steady head for whiskey" into ownership of a
run-down plantation, and after marrying well above his own social station, he
ultimately satisfies his "ruthless longing" for a respected place in planter
society.

In the film, by contrast, the means
of Gerald's socioeconomic ascent is never addressed, much less the more questionable
aspects of his Irish background. Mitchell had also presented Tara as a "clumsy,
sprawling" structure with a simple whitewashed brick exterior. The filmmakers,
however, remained deaf to her several pleas for an "ugly, sprawling and
columnless" O'Hara residence in keeping with typical plantation houses in a
Georgia upcountry still not long removed from the frontier. Despite Mitchell's
attempts to revise key aspects of both popular and scholarly myth, producer
Selznick made it clear that he had no intention of poking holes in what
remained a delightfully marketable plantation legend. Thus, Mitchell was left
to conclude that she and a tiny cadre of southern historical realists might "write
the truth about the antebellum South . . . until Gabriel blows his trump, and
everyone would go on believing the Hollywood version."

In truth, the film did a little
better in capturing Mitchell's disdain for the legend of the white South's
heroic "Redemption" from Reconstruction by a resurgent planter aristocracy.
After the war, her high-minded, genteel families like the Wilkeses flounder and
fail, especially Ashley, who seemed wonderfully grand in the Old South but
proves woefully inept in the New. Scarlett, meanwhile, summons the grit and
gall that is her patrimony from the low-born Gerald, rising above her despair
in the garden at Twelve Oaks and heading off to a rebuilding Atlanta, where
there was "still plenty of money to be made by anyone who isn't afraid to
work--or to grab."

Scarlett quickly proves that she is hesitant to do neither. Her
"harsh contact with the red earth of Tara" has transformed her into a
thoroughgoing economic realist who grimly concedes that the Yankees were right
about at least one thing: "It took money to be a lady." Ironically, her only means of feeling like a
lady again was to "make money for herself, as men made money."

Suffice it to say, Mitchell's black
characters reveal no such complexity or depth but remain steadfastly and
stereotypically one-dimensional. Hence, the widespread perception today of her
novel as nothing more than what one critic called "a racist, revisionist Southern apologetic" written by a
wealthy white Atlanta debutante still embittered about the outcome of
the Civil War. This facile exercise in regional stereotyping is unfortunate, to
say the least, especially given the current anger and division nationwide over
what appears to be a pattern of undifferentiated racial profiling by law
enforcement, the courts, and let's face it, a lot of white citizens as well. Accordingly,
Americans would do well to reconsider such conveniently narrow sectional
pigeonholing of a book that was actually quite compatible with white racial
attitudes, both popular and scholarly, prevailing nationally at the end of the
1930s and well beyond. Such a reconsideration might even mean that the next
time an Eric Garner is killed by police outside the South, we could at least be
spared the long since predictable, almost willfully naive reaction registered
by a recent "Justice for All" protester who exclaimed, "This isn't the Deep South. This isn't Mississippi in the
1960s. This is New York City in 2014."

Novelist Pat Conroy has suggested
that, for still-angry and defiant white southerners, Gone With the Wind amounted to "a clenched fist raised to the North." This is doubtless correct, but there is little evidence
that many white northerners interpreted it this way at the time. Nor was there
much indication that Mitchell's racist language and depictions were
particularly offensive to whites outside the South in an early 1939 Gallup
survey suggesting that some 14 million Americans had read her book in its first
30 months in print and positing a likely national audience of some 56.5 million
viewers for the eagerly anticipated film based on it.

If neither Mitchell nor the great balance of
her national readership appeared to give much thought to the disturbing racial
realities behind the seductive southern legend, the same could just as easily
be said of a great many white academic historians, North and South. Mitchell
was thoroughly conversant with the relevant (white) scholarship at her
disposal, and her airbrushed portrait of slavery and casual indulgence in
racial stereotypesare hardly at
odds perceptions offered by two distinguished Ivy League historians in the most
widely used collegiate U.S. history textbook of the day. "Sambo," they assured
students, did not fare badly in bondage because, despite the horror stories
served up by the uptight abolitionists, "the majority of the slaves were
adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy."

Likewise, Scarlett's charge that
emancipation "just ruined the darkies" fairly echoed the sentiments of Columbia
University's profoundly influential historian of Reconstruction, William A.
Dunning, who insisted that "the freedmen . . . could not for generations be on
the same social, moral and intellectual plane with the whites." The sole aim of
Dunning and his many students and disciples, charged W. E. B. Dubois, was "to
prove that the South was right in Reconstruction, the North vengeful or
deceived and the Negro stupid."

Such biased and offensive treatments had
already passed for scholarship far too long when they finally came under
concentrated assault by black activists and educators during World War II. The
blatant hypocrisy of a Jim Crow army fighting in defense of freedom and
democracy abroad, as well as the greater economic and political empowerment
that the war engendered, had borne fruit in a more insistent, unremitting
resolve. African Americans must at last be granted the full measure of both
their rights as citizens and the dignity and respect those rights conferred. Still,
although white and black scholars alike would soon be undertaking dramatic
revisions of historical interpretations of slavery as well as Reconstruction, not
until 1960s would either the now-notorious "Sambo" passage be excised from the
still-popular textbook or the racist and inaccurate Dunningite portrayal of
Reconstruction meet with full-blown refutation.

Although Gone With The Wind consistently ranks second only to The Holy Bible as Americans' favorite
book, a new Economistpoll shows that
only 20 percent of Americans have actually read it, while less than 30 percent
of those under thirty have even seen the movie. These figures might strike some
as positive rather than negative indicators, but there is a real sense in which
all Americans, regardless of age, race, or region, would benefit from reading
Mitchell's book for what it is, not simply as a white southerner's distorted
defense of her region's uniquely horrific racial past, but as a strikingly
clear window into a national past whose burdens confront them even today.
Although it may fall short of being a great one, Gone With The Wind is--and always was--a thoroughly American novel.

P.S. This bloviation is a streamlined version of a piece posted
over at likethedew.com.

P. P.S. The ol' Bloviator knows "Cobbloviate Heads" near and
far will not feel as though Christmas is really here until they receive the
traditional greetings of the season, courtesy of his faithful ol' pickup, which
is still flashing away after 20 years and 100k+ miles. Merry Christmas to you
all, and, as always, to the Techsters, who may still be celebrating
their-once-in-a-blue moon victory with a "Blue Moon" (ugh!) or several about
now, "Felice Bobby Dodd!"

The Ol' Bloviator has not gotten so old that he doesn't
recall ranting about the "get-drunk-party-till-you-puke-or-pass out-or-both"
culture that dominates the student scene at far too many of our universities
these days. Since this comprehensive report on the pathological potential of booze-fueled fraternity life ran in TheAtlantic
a while back, outrageous accounts of massive alcohol abuse linked to deaths, physical
injury and especially to sexual assault, have become standard fare in major
newspapers and magazines. Despite individual and programmatic efforts by campus
administrators to curb it, binge drinking appears to be a regular activity for
four in ten of today's students. Recent data shows roughly 1,800 college students
die each year from some sort of alcohol-related injury, and some 97,000 annually
report sexual assaults where alcohol was a contributing factor.

Escalating
concerns about rapes committed on and around campus took on even greater
urgency after Rolling Stone's recent
piece about this problem at no-less-storied an institution than "Mr. Jefferson's University"
in Charlottesville, which was already under serious federal scrutiny for its
inadequate handling of previous sexual assault charges. RS's report centered on "Jackie," a female student who claimed that
she had been brutally gang-raped as a freshman after attending a party at the
Phi Kappa Psi house in 2012 and that, while apparently sympathetic, university
officials discouraged her from pursuing her claim or discussing the incident
publicly and took no action against her accused assailants.

Skeptical of
some of the details of Jackie's account, the Washington Post and
other media outlets opted for a little fact-checking on their own and are now
reporting that certain of her claims about the identity of her alleged
assailant and the place and date of the alleged assault could not be
corroborated, Rolling Stone's
representatives admit that they may have given Jackie too much benefit of the
doubt and that they ran the story without securing comment from those she
accused. Jackie continues to stand by her account, however, and her supporters
point out that confusion about details is not uncommon among deeply traumatized
victims of sexual assault. Still, this sorry and reckless excuse for journalism
is certain to bolster the skepticism of those who think the prevalence sexual
victimization on campus is overblown.

For their part, however, UVA administrators, who
responded to the initial RS article
by clamping down hard on Phi Kappa Psi and other campus fraternities, have not
leapt forward to claim vindication merely by virtue of the holes poked in
Jackie's story as it was reported. Rather, in what may be a classic case of
better late than never, they have reaffirmed their awareness that university
has some serious 'splainin' to do where
handling sexual assault charges is concerned. Thus quoth UVA prez Teresa
Sullivan: "Over the
past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the
most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual
violence on college campuses. Today's news must not alter this focus. Here at
U.Va., the safety of our students must continue to be our top priority, for all
students, and especially for survivors of sexual assault."

This stance
is, to say the least, prudent. Not only because of the federal investigators
who continue to hover about, but because UVA's history in this area demands it.
The university's "honor code," which not only forbids acts of academic
dishonesty but demands that students report such acts by others, is a genuine
point of pride among students, faculty, and alums. The thing is, however,
although 183 students have been expelled
for honor-code violations since 1998, there is no record of a single matriculant having been expelled for
sexual assault, including those who have admitted to it. Given the revelations
of countless investigations and surveys of the incidence of sexual assaults on
campus, a ratio of 183-0 would seem pretty hard to justify.

For all the
questions about the details of Jackie's personal account, the RS piece nonetheless provides credible
evidence of an entrenched social hierarchy whose exclusiveness not only
discourages female students from filing claims of sexual assault but
aggressively stigmatizes and marginalizes those who do. The OB has always
wished that his own university could achieve a greater semblance of the
powerful sense of academic purpose that pervades the UVA campus, and he still
does. Secretly at least, he has also been taken with the notion as one student
put it, "the most impressive person at UVA is the person who gets straight A's and
goes to all the parties." The more he ponders the significance of such a
student role model, however, the more the O.B. is forced to consider its full
implications. What happens to all the kids bent on establishing their bonafides
as both budding scholars and big-time drinkers when pursuing both goals proves
mutually exclusive? Outfit yourself with the emotional maturity of an
eighteen-year-old, even a very bright one, and venture a guess as to which aim
is most likely to be compromised.

All of the dangerous and potentially disastrous
possibilities that arise when young people are put in a situation where they
are free to choose beers over books (and most anything else) are brought home
quite literally in this Chronicle of
Higher Educationstory that shows our beloved Classic
City virtually Dawg paddling in '"a river of booze.".As these things go, this piece seems reasonably balanced, notably more so
than the RS expose on UVA. There are
concerned people, like UGA Police Chief Jimmy Williamson and alcohol counseling
specialist Liz Prince, who seem to be doing what they can to reduce underage
drinking or excessive drinking in a downtown which offers 50 bars within a
quarter of a mile of campus, as well as roughly that many more restaurants that
also serve alcohol.

Ironically, legend has it that Athens was chosen over
nearby Watkinsville as the site for the nation's first state-chartered
university because the latter was already home to a prospering tavern likely to
corrupt the college lads. The writers trace Athens's history as "a big booze town" to the 1980s when, with
downtown businesses closing or migrating out to "mall-ville" and only a
relatively few bars downtown, UGA officials began trying to cut down on
drinking at frat houses, even issuing a ban on keggers. Fearful that downtown
would continue hemorrhaging businesses to the 'burbs and eager to accommodate
thirsty young collegians, municipal officials did not limit the number of bars
or restaurants that started to pop up, especially after the city's music scene
exploded. Despite credible efforts to make bar owners and bouncers more
accountable, however, for local officials it all came down to, as one
tavern-keeper put it, "they hate we're here, but they love the money." One
reckons so, since Athens-Clarke County reportedly collects seven cents on the
dollar for every mixed drink, in addition to a three-cent excise tax and a
twenty-two-cent levy for every bottle of booze emptied. Needless to say, the
proprietors of Athens's drinking establishments are not particularly opposed to
making money either, and they scramble mightily to keep their places packed
into the wee hours. To remain competitive, some bars resort to unannounced "specials"
involving one-cent beers, free drinks for women, etc., all of which are spread
instantly across a vast network of texters and tweeters leading, practically in
the blinking of an already bloodshot eye, to wholesale migration of committed
young boozers from one watering hole to another. And so it goes, until
mandatory closing hours force them to disgorge their drunken denizens onto the
streets of Athens, where the scene can easily turn from celebratory to scary in
the drooping of an eyelid.

For example, a Chronicle writer
looks on as UGA police discover a young man "lying on a public bench, at the
end of a trail of vomit. He is unconscious; his front pocket gapes, a wallet
falling partway out. An officer shakes him, and again, finally rousing him.
'How much,' the officer demands, 'have you had to drink?'" The kid's response
of "Zero, Zero?" is needless to say, undermined by his present condition and
circumstances; the trusty Breathalyzer simply confirms the obvious, and he is
off to jail. "I can't just leave him on a bench with a citation in his pocket,"
Chief Williamson explains. "A citation's not going to sober him up."

There is also the
student who "has tripped and fallen after a night out and hit her head.
Officers arrive to find Jacqueline, a nineteen-year-old with long,
honey-colored hair, stretched out on the cold slab of a bus stop, surrounded by
concerned friends. After falling she was unresponsive, for maybe thirty
seconds, maybe a minute or two--no one seems quite clear--but long enough to
prompt a call to 911. Now an egg-shaped welt has begun to swell next to her
right eye, and her speech is slurred. Asked who is the president of the United
States, she names her sorority president." (This is no laughing matter, of
course, but the image of Barack Obama trying to bring a meeting of chatty
Tri-Delts to order might well serve as a metaphor for his efforts with the
Senate.) In this case, Jacqueline is bundled off to the ER, but UGA's
campus cops are reportedly making 900-1,000 underage drinking arrests a year,
and although they have caught considerable flak for being too aggressive on
this front, even casual observers of the early morning scene downtown will
surely see this figure as indicative of a restrained approach.

It is hardly news that
college students drink a lot and always have, but if you are using this to
persuade yourself that there is nothing to be bothered about here, your head is
buried not in sand, but concrete. As the writers note, "Average blood-alcohol
levels in students stopped by the police have risen steadily--this year one blew
a 0.33, more than four times the legal limit. With heavier drinking, the police
now make drunk-driving arrests in midmorning, pulling over students on their
way to class still intoxicated from the night before."

The O.B. has no reason
to doubt this based on the number of students he has encountered in morning
classes who show up smelling as if they just crawled out of a vat of Natty
Light and proceed immediately to surrender themselves to the clutches of
Morpheus in a head-thrown-back, mouth-wide-open-pose that seems de rigueur when
sleeping off a world-class bender. It is hard to think of a more underweighted
or unrepresentative stat than the 25 percent of college students who admit to
academic difficulties brought on by alcohol abuse. If you could throw in those
who don't even recognize this has happened and those who do but simply won't
admit it, that number would doubtless shoot up dramatically.

We might well yammer
back and forth forever about whether universities or law enforcement officials
have done enough to try to curb student alcohol abuse without realizing that we
are letting one critical group of culpables off scot free. Chief Williamson
notes that the mother of the aforementioned young "Zero, Zero," who was found
virtually insensate on a public bench, practically begging to be robbed and/or
assaulted, did not take kindly to his arresting her innocent little boy. He is
quick--and correct--to point out that, thanks to this kind of indulgent excuse
for parenting, too many freshmen show up in Athens with a firmly established
drinking habit as part of their baggage. Though he speaks to thousands of
students a year about the dangers of excessive drinking, "How can I do
something in five minutes," he asks, that their parents "couldn't do in 18
years?" The Chronicle writer adds that "too many parents have
failed to talk to their children about responsible alcohol use. They've looked
the other way. They've dismissed binge drinking and other risky behavior with,
'Kids will be kids.'" In reality, so thinks the O.B. anyway, they have actually
done worse than that by trying to be kids along with their kids, succumbing to
some nostalgia-blinded notion that it's OK to relive their own collegiate years
through their children, as if the perils and pressures awaiting their
college-bound offspring are no different than they were thirty years ago. The
O.B was around back then, and, in outright defiance of fate, gravity, and
public opinion, he is still around today. He knows better, and if the Moms
and Dads of today's collegians would drop the Peter Pan fantasy and face up to
reality, they would, too. It's much easier, though, to abandon any pretense of
trying seriously to discourage underage and/or excessive drinking, wink at fake
I.D.s and reports of prodigious alcohol ingestion, and chuckle about Tara and
Trey simply being chips off the old one-time champion chugger block. This may
be a sure-fire way to endear yourselves to your kids but it's also a no
less certain means of putting them at greater risk. The O.B. has never been too
keen about universities operating in loco parentis, but by
golly, when the parents abdicate their responsibilities and go plumb loco
themselves, a poor substitute seems better than none.

Now
that, for the time being at least, the last mud pie has been flung and the last
stink bomb hurled, the Ol' Bloviator deems it safe to emerge from his bunker,
where he was fully prepared to slurp down a cyanide capsule the very next time
ol' Zig-Zag Zell talked up Michelle Nunn in one ad only to endorse Nathan (Double)
Deal-er in the following one. In fact, the O.B. even dares at this point to toss out a few little "drive-by"
observations about this most recent demonstration of our state's chronic electile
dysfunction.

The first is
that a bunch of blindly optimistic liberals high on polling data churned out by
everybody and his first cousin who happens to have a telephone and a calculator
is a recipe for a resurrection that turns out to be a wake . We can go a long
ways toward explaining how so many pollsters could be wrong about what unfolded
in Georgia by allowing for the fact that their ranks are so swollen that they
were probably surveying each other half the time. It seems that one presumed
short cut to institutional legitimacy these days is opening up a brand new
polling center. (Ask yourself if there was really ever any reason to suspect that
a Quinnipiac University existed before there was a Quinnipiac poll. Didn't think
so.) As a result, you've got a bunch of
pollsters who have so little experience and training in survey research that
they not only don't know what they're
doing, they don't even know why they
are doing it. Things only get worse when you throw in a bunch of political media
slugs who are no less addicted to "momentum shifts" than their counterparts who
call football games. Recall how many times you have heard sportscasters seize
on the fact that Vandy actually made two consecutive first downs at the end of the
first halfas evidence that Bama will
have a fight on their hands in the second, and you can better understand why
some of the liberal persuasion in these parts were all prepared to really whoop
it up when the Democratic governor- and senator-elects rode down Peachtree
through a blizzard of tickertape in an open Mustang ragtop on loan from Barrack
Obama. Beloved, as ol' Brother Dave Gardner would likely say, clear your heads
of such foolishness. The demographers and survey researchers and assorted
sunshine pumpers leaping to absurd conclusions may shout all they please that
Georgia is getting "bluer" by the minute, but they would be a lot more accurate
-and get a lot less attention, of course--if they described it as gradually "purpling"
instead.

As a testament
to that gradualism, that map yonder shows the 34 Georgia counties (in blue)
carried by Barack Obama in 2008. These also account for all the counties
carried in 2014 by Democratic senatorial candidate Michelle Nunn and gubernatorial
aspirant Jason Carter, except for the two (in lighter blue), Henry (carried by
both) and Wilkinson (carried by Carter). In many of the old Obama counties, the
margin was razor thin to non-existent. Nunn battled to a flat-footed tie down in
Baker, which Carter lost by 13 votes. The counties captured by Nunn and Carter include
all those with black majorities, and, save for the little hotbed of sedition
and free love that we Athenians call home, none of their remaining counties are
less than 40% black. Black ballots were clearly very much a factor in about the
only good news to come out of this otherwise disastrous election for the
Democrats, the breakthrough in Henry County, where the black population share has
now grown to 40 %. Mitt Romney managed a 3,000-vote win there two years ago, but
both Nunn and Carter squoze by this time with about 400 votes to spare.

However pleased
Democrats may be to see some apparent movement in their direction in Henry, things
were at an almost dead calm in the six additional metro counties that have gone
Democratic in the last two presidential elections. Nunn and Carter ran within a
point of Obama's percentages in 2012 in all of them. Obama gobbled up about 98%
of the black vote statewide in that contest, compared to 92% for Nunn and 89%
for Carter this year. As always for Democrats in these parts, however, the
problem was not with the black support. Exit polls show Nunn and Carter
receiving but 23% of the total white vote, precisely the share apparently claimed
by Obama in 2012.

It might be worth noting that there was something
of a departure from recent precedent along gender lines among whites this time
out. In recent years, the gap between the voting preferences of white women and
white men in the South has been negligible, and, if anything, enthusiasm for
the Repubs was slightly higher among the former. The eight-point advantage Nunn enjoyed among
white women as opposed to white men in this election might simply be ascribed
to gender loyalty, were it not for the nine-point male-female differential favoring
Carter. As with most such shifts in voter behavior, we won't know what, if
anything, this one means until it's election time again.

One thing we
definitely know hasn't changed is the rock-hard resistance of working class white southerners to any and all Democratic
entreaties and advances. Five majority white counties showed average weekly
wages below $500 in 2012. Sure enough, that sweat-shoppin' outsourcin' son of a
gun, David Perdue, carried all of them resoundingly, three of them by more than
80%. In fact, ol' down-sizin' Dave actually ran a teency bit stronger with
whites making less than thirty grand a year than among those knocking down more
than a hundred.

It is no less
striking, of course, that white
Georgians would re-elect a governor who, by all rights, should be stamping out
license plates, instead of signing bills into law. One thing is clear, both
Carter's and Nunn's disappointing showings demonstrate that political coattails
go threadbare in a hurry once nobody is actually wearing the coat itself.

There was a time when moderates could sell themselves as
more conservative than they were, as Jason' grandpa did in 1970, when he managed
to pull in enough Wallace and even Maddox voters with a bunch of jawboning
against busing and government social programs to whup that liberal elitist Carl
Sanders in the Demo Primary and breeze into the governor's mansion past hapless
Hal Suit, the nominee of a bunch of equally hapless Georgia Republicans. Not so
today, however. The Republicans are firmly ensconced at the top of the
political pyramid, and there is absolutely no chance of their letting you con
voters into thinking you are anywhere near as conservative as they are. Still,
to varying degrees, both Carter and Nunn were ultimately reduced to employing what
amounts to the "I'm-more-like-my-opponent-than-you -think" strategy, and their altogether
predictable failure simply affirms that if you're running against a Baptist preacher, "What
a Friend We Have in Jesus" just doesn't cut it as a campaign theme.

(The data cited above was drawn almost exclusively from CNN Election Central. Any errors you detect are almost certainly theirs. A somewhat briefer version of this rant will show up in honest-to-God ink this week in America's favorite indie, The Flagpole.)

From where the
Ol' Bloviator sits, it's fair to say that the South and Scotland go back a
ways. For example, the cult of the "Lost Cause" that sprang up in the aftermath
of the South's failed fight for independence had something of an antecedent in
the fabled "lost cause" of the Scottish Jacobites whose four-decade struggle to
restore to the Stuart monarchy of Scotland to its rightful seat on the thrones
of England, Scotland, and Ireland was heartily romanticized in the novels of
Sir Walter Scott. Scott's glorification of the swashbuckling supporters of the
Stuart restoration was so popular with the southern upper classes in the
antebellum era that Mark Twain famously cited their affliction with the "Sir
Walter Disease" as the principal cause of the Civil War.

Beyond that, the strategically critical Confederate defeat at Gettysburg
in 1863 is sometimes compared to the 1746 Battle of Culloden, where Jacobite
forces, representing by no means all of the Scots, but comprised in large
measure of wild and exceedingly hairy (not to mention altogether ungovernable)
Highlanders, were crushed by Hanoverian forces representing George II. Unlike
Gettysburg, the matter in dispute at Culloden was not separation from Great
Britain, but actually reunification under a Scottish monarch. On the other
hand, there are similarities in the fact that the Confederate forces at
Gettysburg were there largely at the behest of an aggressive slave-holding
minority who saw their interests being better served in an independent southern
nation, while, the Highlanders saw returning the Stuarts to the British throne
as their best bet for retaining their cherished independence to rut, drink,
brawl, and pillage as they damn well pleased.

There are similar parallels with
Thursday's vote on Scotland's secession, although the "nays" had it in this
case, and with 85 percent of those eligible showing up to weigh in on the
matter directly, it was far more democratic than the process by which the South
left the United States 153 years earlier, when only Virginia and Tennessee
required a popular referendum to certify their respective legislatures' votes
for secession. Perhaps the most striking parallel lies in the economic
centerpiece of the secessionist appeal in both cases.

Sorry [Scottish nationalist] Alex
Salmond, but compared to the South's position in the global economy in 1860,
today's Scotland is something of a bit player. By the 1820s, the southern
states had already become the world's premier supplier of cotton, and by the
late antebellum period, more than three-fourths of its cotton was being
exported. Not only was cotton the leading American export in the antebellum
period, but when cotton was combined with the two other leading southern
staples, tobacco and rice, the South, with just over a third of the nation's
population (free and slave), accounted for well over half of the value of all
American exports during the 1850s.With cotton
prices rising by more than 11 cents a pound over the decade, the value of slave
property alone soared to an estimated $3-4 billion by 1861, making the
Confederacy, by aggregate measurement at least, one of the wealthiest nations
in the world.

The South's prominent position in the world economy not only encouraged
southern leaders to oppose the protective tariff and other measures
disadvantageous to the cotton export trade, but it reinforced their
predispositions toward a belief in southern superiority or even invincibility.
When he proclaimed in 1858 that "Cotton is King" and "No power on earth dares
to make war on it," South Carolina's James Henry Hammond actually sounded
fairly moderate in comparison to another southerner who insisted that without
southern cotton "England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized
world with her, save the South." Such assertions may seem altogether ludicrous
in retrospect, but at the peak of England's textile expansion, the loss of southern
cotton, which then accounted for nearly 80 percent of its cotton imports, would
obviously have smarted quite a bit.

Alas, however, unbeknownst to the
overheated southern orators who were lustily proclaiming the perpetual reign of
King Cotton, the great British textile boom of the nineteenth century had
already begun to recede. Britain's leaders could hardly have recognized it at
the time, but thanks to a prudent policy of limited cotton stockpiling in
recent years, a bumper 1860 crop already on hand, and reasonable prospects for
relying on alternative sources such as Egypt and India if need be, they would
soon feel less need for the vaunted southern staple than those across the
Atlantic who had invested such faith in it could ever imagine.

Even if British textile magnates had presumed their desire for that
staple would survive the Civil War undiminished, they had little reason to
doubt that, as in the past, northern agents, factors, and shippers would still
be critical to whatever postbellum commerce in southern cotton they might
conduct. There was also industrial England's continuing need for northern wheat
(which accounted for, on average, about 25 percent of its wheat imports in the
1850s), and the annual volume of pre-war commerce between England and the
northern states in general had to be considered as well. (Suffice it to say,
nobody in the King Cotton camp seemed to have pondered the effects of having to
forego the substantial supply of Midwestern wheat and northern manufactured
goods also purchased by southerners at that point.)

In addition, had blustering,
cotton-drunk southerners sobered up even briefly, they might also have picked
up on signals from a reconfigured and rapidly modernizing North Atlantic trade
network that industry, not agriculture, was to be the new dynamo of world
capitalism. While the South, with only 11 percent of America's manufacturing
investment in 1860, had shown neither the capacity nor the inclination to
adjust to this transformation-in-progress, the emerging entrepreneurial culture
and stellar economic prospects of the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states had
already attracted the attention and investments of their on-the-make
counterparts in Britain who had good reason to believe that the two could be
looking at a bountiful future together. Beyond such dollars and cents
calculations, it is fair to say that the 100 percent cotton blinders favored by
southern leaders apparently obscured the size and growing strength of the
abolitionist movement, not only in England but elsewhere in Europe.

If the foregoing raises doubt about the savvy of the southern
secessionist contingent, it should at least be noted that most of the unheeded
signals not to leave the Union are far more obvious in retrospect than they
could possibly have been at the time. That is not the case, however, with the
economic pitch served up by Scotland's contemporary campaigners for
independence. Southern secessionists'
faith in the long-term power and viability of King Cotton may have been overly
optimistic, even wildly so, but their claims did not fly in the face of any
such massively contradictive body of evidence and analysis as confronted the
assertions of Scottish secessionist leaders like Alex Salmond that an
independent Scotland stood to reap a veritable bounty in what he estimated to
be 24 billion barrels of remaining North Sea oil deposits, which, in turn,
could be used to fund the expanded welfare state most independence advocates
seemed to desire.

Respected petroleum experts
not only suspect that Salmond has overshot the mark here by 40 to 60 percent,
but point out as well that current North Sea oil production is down two-thirds
from its 1990s peak. Beyond that, there is no guarantee that the U. K. will
actually hand over all the tax revenue generated by North Sea oil production,
and even if it does, last year's tax take of 5 billion pounds is equivalent to
only about 3 percent of Scotland's economy. Meanwhile, major international petroleum
companies largely seem more inclined to cut back on their North Sea operations
than to expand them, given the current uncertainty both over oil prices and the
cost of new production facilities. All of this is to say that putting all the
South's eggs in the cotton basket in 1860 seems almost conservative compared to
the efforts of Scottish secessionists to downplay the astonishing risk attached
to a "King Petroleum" secession strategy.

There were, of course,
additional related concerns that may have undermined the efforts of the Scottish "Secesh." While the
currency question was less troubling at the outset for the Confederates, the
matter of whether an independent Scotland could continue to pound the pound or,
if not, could even count on being able to jump immediately to the Euro clearly loomed
large in Thursday's vote.

Beyond the concrete issues
on which the Scottish secession movement was ultimately splattered, from
Charleston in 1861 to Edinburgh in 2014, sentiment for disunion was fueled in
no small part by pure emotion, be it festering resentment or wounded pride or a
combination thereof. In this respect, back-to-back screenings of "Brave Heart"
and "Gone With The Wind" might give us the best comparative perspective on two
secession movements separated by more than 150 years. Failing that, maybe just
noting that ol' 007 himself, Sir Sean Connery, saw Scottish independence
offering a glorious opportunity to toot his homeland's horn and maybe even make
a pound/euro in the bargain through "international promotion of Scotland
as an iconic location." Whatever comes next, Sir Sean will surely be as eager
as the ol' Bloviator to see whether the resurgent independence movement, which
has clearly stirred Scotland, will leave it thoroughly shaken as well.

(An earlier version of this humble offering was
posted at www.likethedew.com)

The
older he gets and the worse things get, the Ol' Bloviator is finding
progressively less satisfaction in yelling, "I told you so!" when one of his
rants about our ever-madder dash toward doom comes true. This is certainly true
in the case of two recent and remarkably similar incidents that amount to textbook
examples of the ongoing devaluation of education in the face of a comparably blind,
but increasingly overpowering obsession with industrial development as a "bargain
at any cost" panacea for all our ills.

Witness the crisis over in Alabama,
where their subsidies to new plants over the last two decades have long since
run well into the billions, but it seems
they are running short of cash just now to shower on the next corporate candidate
for a humongouspublic payout. Not to
worry, however, Alabama governor Robert Bentley has come up with an inspired, yet
simple solution for this dilemma; he
wants to shift funds from education in order to shore up the stash he draws on
in his role as the state's official bagman to new companies. The rationale for
this switcheroo seems clear enough to Bentley: "Who pays for the incentives?
It's not education, but they benefit from it totally . . . you ought to eat
what you kill."
(If the Guv. really practices what he preaches here, he better pray he never
hits a feasting buzzard while travelling on Alabama's excellent highway network.)
Although some Alabama legislators expressed reservations about a special
legislative session geared to making the governor's enlightened proposal a
reality, it was not clear whether they objected to the move so much as to
Bentley's failure to consult with them before releasing what he later insisted
was merely a "trial balloon" that had simply been "misconstrued." Yeah, right.
Alabama governors are known for their exceedingly complex thinking and
rhetoric. For example, it took the O.B. forever to figure out what "Segregation
Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever!" meant. Unfortunately, former governor
Fob James's intellectual firepower went largely unappreciated, as became
apparent when his industry-hunting trip to Israel was billed as "Our Yahoo
Meets Their Netanyahu." Not coincidently, perhaps, back in the nineties, it was
Fob who tried to raid the school fund to pay off part of the state's subsidy
obligation to Mercedes.

Meanwhile,
Mississippi politicians are seldom accused of subtlety, and when they are, as
in this case, it is almost always in comparison their counterparts in Alabama.
According to this report, the state of Mississippi has been in violation of its
own laws since 2008 by failing to provide its legally mandated share of public
school funding. It is currently spending
$648 less per pupil than it did in 2008, and since then, it has racked up an
illegal deficit in public education of at least $1.3 billion. In what must
surely rank as the great-grandmother of all coincidences, that is precisely the
figure arrived at by researchers in 2013 as the total value of the tax breaks
promised to Nissan in exchange for locating a production facility at Canton,
Mississippi.

Over
thirty years, the tax abatements offered Nissan will cost Madison County an
estimated $210 million in revenue that might otherwise have been spent on
schools. Beyond that, in a program truly reminiscent of the old sweat shop days
when workers' pay checks were docked for a "subscription fee" used to defray
the cost of building their employer's plant, Nissan is also allowed to keep what would normally be state income tax deductions from their employees'
wages. Over twenty-five years, this nifty little palm greaser could ultimately
top off at $160 million.

Reports
of such extravagances in two states not exactly known for their heroic
sacrifices in the war against ignorance simply underscore the hypocrisy of current pious calls for "austerity," the
fallout from which continues to fall heavily on public education. Perhaps the
O.B. might be forgiven for nearly going a tad bit postal upon reading a New York
Times account of Ranger Rick Perry's efforts to oust the current president
of the University of Texas where, instead of just teaching the great gobs of info
they already know, the faculty are apparently wasting their time and the public's
money in trying to find out even more stuff (God knows what) to teach. In their
discussion of the many difficulties facing public university presidents these
days, the reporters twice refer to declining state "subsidies" for public
higher education. Instead of reaching for his twelve-gauge, however, the O.B. ultimately opted for a high-minded remonstrance,
dispatched with dispatch to the nation's number one publishing platform:

In an otherwise
excellent account of efforts to oust the president of the University of Texas,
the writers twice refer to recent cuts in legislative appropriations for public
higher education as "declining state subsidies." In the current
political climate that this story so vividly reflects, this is heavily
freighted language. However inadvertently, it reinforces the popular notion
that state funding for an institution created by the state to function as a
duly constituted obligation of the state is instead some sort of voluntary
dispensation or indulgence. In the operative sense of the word, the funding
received by the University of Texas from the State of Texas is no more a
"subsidy" than is Governor Rick Perry's salary.

The O.B. assumed at the outset, correctly,
as it turned out, that his missive would almost certainly never make it into
print, but he also assumed that sending it would at least make him feel a
little better. Maybe it did, but the futility and meaninglessness of his
gesture was quickly hammered home not only by the foregoing accounts from Dixie
but comparable ones from elsewhere in the country, like New Jersey, where Gov.
Chris[py Kreme] Christie has already signed off on $2 billion in corporate
subsidies and state funding for higher education has fallen by more than 20
percent over the last six years. It was once almost a given that politicians were
obliged to at least pay lip service to the notion that education is a powerful
engine of economic progress. These days, a growing number of them seem to want
us to see it as merely a cumbersome caboose.

I once wrote a book about the Mississippi Delta
called The Most Southern Place on Earth.
Were I to undertake a comparable tome about the most "American" place on earth,
believe it or not, the focal point would not only lie outside the United
States, but, of all places, in France, specifically, the Normandy American
Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, where lie the remains of 9,387 of the U.S
troops who died during the June 1944 Allied invasion. More than any other historical
site or monument that I have ever visited--in fact, more than all of them put
together--this place engulfs me in a wave of teary, tingly, emotions. Set atop a
bluff overlooking the English Channel and Omaha Beach against a stunning
backdrop of lush, unimaginably green grass and perpetually wind-bent trees,
even with the surf pounding rhythmically just below, the iconic, seemingly
endless rows of perfectly aligned white crosses convey a palpable sense of
peace and order that belies the chaos and wholesale slaughter that raged down
on the beach 70 years ago. There is some irony in the fact that the Normandy
American Cemetery provides entree and closure to the epic 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, whose opening
scenes reflect an unprecedented cinematic effort to depict the D-Day landing as
the nightmare of bloody, headless, legless, disemboweled carnage and confusion
that it actually was.

In
truth, this placid and pristine setting seems far better suited to serve as the
final resting place of characters slain in earlier, less graphic World War II
movies like The Longest Day who died
neatly and, so it would seem, painlessly, shot down as they stood just inches
from an apparently bulletproof John Wayne or Robert Mitchum. After all, in the
popular mind at least, this was a war in which men died bravely and stoically,
repeating the Lord's Prayer or receiving the last rites or saying the Kaddish,
not one where agonized screaming or crying was punctuated by horrible
blasphemies alternating with piteous, little-boy pleas for "Mama."

There
is no record of the final minutes of Technical Specialist Five Joseph G. Hardy,
the only World War II soldier who entered the service in Clarke County to be
memorialized at the cemetery. In reality, Hardy (who actually hailed from the
tiny hamlet of Good Hope (pop.219), in nearby Walton County) never even set
foot on the sands of Normandy, because he was among the 39 members of Battery B
of the 4th Infantry Division's 29th Field Artillery
Battalion who were killed when their landing craft struck a mine on its
approach to Utah Beach on June 6. Like most of his fallen battery mates,
Hardy's body was never recovered, and thus his name is among the 1,557
inscribed on the "The Walls of The Missing," which encircle a beautifully
maintained garden.

Idly
perusing the names and accompanying states etched on the gravestones, I found
myself wondering how many of the small-town boys like Joseph Hardy had even
been out of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi or South Carolina prior to the war.
It is frankly difficult for me grasp how so vast an abstraction as national
allegiance or patriotic duty could motivate thousands of such men to come
thousands of miles away from home to step off landing crafts and wade into an
unrelenting volley of lethal lead. In anointing this place with their blood and
sacrifice, they made it both an enduring shrine to American national identity
and a source of gnawing self-doubt for succeeding generations destined to
remain forever in their debt.

Those
buried here secured their hallowed place in history by giving their all in an
epochal encounter that effectively secured victory in what seemed an
indisputably righteous crusade against a correspondingly monstrous evil. In
contrast, Vietnam veterans of my generation, who no less heroically risked or
sacrificed their lives have been caught in a historical backlash against a
conflict that, unlike World War II, did not unify us in defense of our
longstanding ideals but instead divided the nation and called those ideals into
question. In what seems an era largely lacking in courage and commitment, some
of today's visitors to the Normandy American Cemetery are likely to leave
inspired but also perhaps a bit saddened by a sense that those interred in this
magnificent setting died in defense of a nation far worthier of their
sacrifices than the one we live in today.

In
reality, of course, this perception requires some degree of selective
historical amnesia. For example, despite serving in a bloody struggle to defend
democracy against a racist, totalitarian onslaught, African American soldiers
in World War II found themselves fighting not just the Germans and the Japanese
but the hostility of white civilians living in the vicinity of their stateside
postings and, worse yet, the resentment and distrust manifested within the
ranks by their own white comrades and commanders. D-Day operations reflected
these racial realities quite clearly, as only a single battalion of black
troops actually landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. Soldiers of the 320th
Barrage Balloon Battalion came in on the third wave to set up anti-aircraft
barrage balloons aimed at preventing German pilots from strafing the beach.
Three members of the 320th are buried here, including Cpl. Brooks Stith from
Virginia and Pfc. James McLean from North Carolina. Had the two survived, both
would have returned to essentially the same segregated, discriminatory and
disfranchised existence they had left behind, although black soldiers who came
back from the war would go on to play a pivotal role in laying the groundwork
for yet another all-out offensive that ultimately toppled Jim Crow. Those who
stand in awe of this fearless band of postwar civil rights crusaders might well
harbor certain sentiments common to American visitors to the Normandy Cemetery,
including the fictional Pvt. James Francis Ryan, who, kneeling at the end of
the film amid the graves of the comrades who gave their lives to save his,
wonders aloud whether "in your eyes I've earned what all of you have done for
me."

Up
until a couple of nights ago, the Ol' Bloviator knew the movie "Downfall" purely as
the source of dozens of parodied video excerpts
in which the captions to Adolph Hitler's enraged harangues during his final
days have been overwritten to depict Hitler as a diehard college football fan
who is just learning that his favorite team was upset by a prohibitive underdog
or lost a big game by virtue of an egregious error by a player or coach. (Think
here of Bama failing to cover a runback of a missed field goal, perhaps, or, if
you must, a Georgia defensive back trying to intercept a pass he should have
batted down but instead deflecting it to an Auburn receiver for the winning TD.
Damn! That still hurts!)

The
actual movie itself purports to show the last dark days in Hitler's bunker
leading up to his suicide after shooting his mistress-just-made-wife, Eva
Braun. Although the whole portrayal is meant to be exceedingly grim, damned if
the Ol' Bloviator didn't still find himself more than a little amused by Hitler's tantrums and tirades. If the O.B. had
been in that bunker and privy to the furious Fuhrer's rants, he would never have
maintained a straight face long enoughto die with the diehards via cyanide capsule, save perhaps one that been administered against his will in suppository
form. His demise would more likely have come from sudden-onset lead poisoning courtesy of a
German Luger at close range.

We know, of course, that Hitler was
a source of considerable mirth in his early days when he could be laughed off a
just another deranged rabble rouser. Yet in the midst of the economic disaster,
crushed national pride, and devastated morale that was the Weimar Republic, his
fury at the injustices visited on the fatherland by the Versailles Treaty after
World War I and his dazzling certainty of German resurrection and redemption
began to gain traction Soon , he had a
fervent following hanging on his every utterance. Some of these, including
several of his co-inhabitants of the bunker, even wound up convincing themselves
that life without Hitler would be unbearable, ultimately opting to join him in
exiting this mortal coil of their own volition. The most disturbing scene in
this thoroughly disturbing film has Hitler propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels's
wife, Magda, who has declared that she doesn't want to live in a world without
National Socialism, making sure that the couple's six children are spared such
a fate as well by methodically inserting
a cyanide capsule between their teeth as they sleep and pushing down on their heads
until she hears a sickening crunch. If you had any lingering doubts, this is
the point where you are fully persuaded this film is not meant to be funny. One
need not suggest that anything like the majority of Germans felt such a
dedication to Hitler but clearly enough of them did to allow him to lead their
nation into destruction at the cost of millions of lives.

Yet another sad example of the
consequences of simply laughing off extremist rhetoric and proposals comes from
the American South at the end of the nineteenth century. Some well-intentioned
opponents of imposing racial discrimination by law, beginning with the
railroads, sought to undermine such efforts with a healthy dose of reductio
ad absurdum. Hence, a Charleston editor suggested in 1898 that "if there
should be Jim Crow scars on the railroads, there should be Jim Crow cars on the
street railways. Also on all passenger boats. . . . Jim Crow waiting saloons at
all stations and Jim Crow eating houses. . . . Jim Crow sections of the jury
box and a separate Jim Crow dock and witness stand and a Jim Crow Bible for
witnesses to kiss." Laughable as the editorialist might have found such a
progression in 1898, as historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out, ere long, save
for the separate witness stand, every presumed absurdity he conjured up "became
in a very short time a reality. . . . including the Jim Crow Bible."

Since, as of the last pay stub, at
least, the OB earns his livelihood by professing at history--and southern
history, at that--he should know full well by now that when something that
seemed like a joke at the outset becomes a concrete reality, there is generally
going to be Hell to pay. North Carolina which has been going to Hell in a
supersonic hand basket of late, even managed to get the draw on their neighbors
to the immediate south by enacting a measure allowing permitted concealed
weapons on playgrounds, school grounds, and, yes, you are reading correctly,
bars as well.Several other states had
preceded the Tar heels in their own willful descent into such lunacy, and not
to be outdone, the venerable solons of the PalmettoState declared it just ducky legally to tote
your piece intoplaces purveying strong
drink of all sorts.The O.B. cannot but
recall that forcing patrons to surrender their six shooters upon entering the Long
Branch Saloon struck Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty as a wise and necessary precaution
back in the Dodge City of yore, but the
wannabe gunslingers in today's state legislatures are apparently too young to remember "Gunsmoke," even in reruns.Although in both states, proprietors are free
to ban guns in their establishments, Pete Matsko, owner of Backstreets Pub and
Grille in Clemson, S. C. has come under
withering fire from gun crazies all over the country for posting what is
admittedly a somewhat immoderately worded notice prohibiting patrons from
bringing their guns into his place of business.

Thinking to reach across state lines in
a show of support for Mr. Matsko, the O.B. actually attempted to round up some
of the hollow-leggedest beer drinkers he
knows for a little road "solidarity forever" road trip over to Clemson. His plan came a' cropper, however, when each
of the assembled crew, not excluding the O.B.,insisted that they could properlydemonstrate their solidarity with the
embattledbarkeep only by prodigious
consumption of the fruit of the hop as served in his own establishment. Thus,
alas, did a noble and idealistic impulse
wither and die for the mere lack of a designated driver.

As steady patrons of this site should readily
attest, the O.B normally tries to steer himself away from blanket generalizations or
stereotypes. In this instance, however, he is not only willing but itchin' to
shed that inhibition. Accordingly, he herewith declares forthrightly that he is
flatly in accord with Mr. Matsko's opinion of the type of people who have been
agitating so fervently to take their guns where they clearly don't belong.
Indeed, he thinks Matsko's appraisal of the types who would actually carry a
concealed weapon into a bar is, if anything, far too charitable. And, Honey Child, don't you
fool yourself into thinking that for most of the folks who agitated
for the sanction to do that very thing, this is merely about some philosophical
abstraction where it's more important to know you have a certain right than it
actually is to exercise it. Beyond that,
let's be clear that, regardless of what they manage to say with a straight
face, they ain't taking their guns into a bar or any other public setting
because they actually feel the need for protection. What they really need is
some reason not simply to feel confident but to feel cocky, cocky enough even to do themselves a little bullying, perhaps. (Stay with him now,
for the O.B. is about to blaze a trail that he thinks will actually lead us out
of this utterly idiotic predicament.) You might think that carrying a concealed
weapon would surely git 'r done cockiness-wise, but in all too many cases, it
won't. How are people going to know you as someone not to be trifled with or
crossed if they can't see your damn gun? Even if they spy that strange bulge in your pocket, they might just assume, a la Mae West, that you're simply glad to see them. These pathetically self-loathing but nonetheless dangerous people are just like an old perv
clad only in a raincoat, black socks, and wingtips--they've got something they
want desperately to show you, and it isn't going to require much of a premise
for them to succumb to the temptation to flash their 9mms.

If the
bearers of arms are so keen on showcasing their pieces, why not let 'em? Better
yet, why not make 'em? Personally, the
O.B. is inclined to believe that pulling out a concealed weapon is actually
fraught with more homicidal potential than simply sporting one on your hip
where everybody can see it. Mandating the "open carry" of legally acquired and
registered firearms would at least give the folks who ain't packing a chance to
see who and how many others are? That way, they can make a truly informed
decision about how they really feel
about downing a Bud and an overpriced burger beside a guy sporting a Glock.
Although the gun bullies are barking louder right now, it might well be that
this "if you got it, [you must] flaunt it" approach to handling this issue would ultimately
reveal that there are more restaurant and bar patrons who actually object to
eating and imbibing in a room full of lethal weapons than there are folks who really
get off on dining in a setting laced with the scent of gun oil. Besides,
although some laws, like those in the Carolinas, forbid people bearing arms
from actually consuming alcohol in a bar, how is the proprietor to identify a
scofflaw in this situation if his weapon is concealed? Of all the patent
absurdities swirling about this latest triumph of the lunatic fringe, this one
may actually cap the keg.While it is
surely reasonable to presume that a person who frequents bars is likely not a
teetotaler in the first place, it is truly an Olympian leap of faith to expect
that he will become one in exchange for the freedom to take hisfirearm into a place wherehe must sit sober whilst those around him are
getting soused, especially when said firearm is concealed.Don't
know about you, but it is a little hard for the O.B. to picture a man shoving a
pistol into his coat pocket and saying "Honey, I'm headin' down to the bar for
a glass of ice water."

In
the O.B.'s mind, Tennessee state senator Mae Beavers had the right idea when
she introduced a bill that would overturn requirements that would-be gun
purchasers go through a background check and training and then buy a permit
before they are allowed to carry a firearm in public places. Senator Beavers
wants to scrap all that red tape and safety mumbo jumbo and require a permit
only if the owner wishes to conceal the weapon. In a predictable show of
courage and good sense, Beaver's colleagues in the state senate embraced her
measure by a vote of twenty-five to two. Regrettably, the Tennessee House
failed to grasp the obvious merits of the uninhibited "open-carry" provision, and the
measure was, dare I say, "shot down," in committee.

Close on the heels of Ms. Beavers'
s abortive measure came Georgia's so-called "guns
everywhere" law, which allowed for guns in bars and as well as churches, although, thanks
to a fleeting resurgence reason, college campuses were spared , for now at
least, the fate of becoming free-fire zones. (Readers of the previous posting on this site
should be able to infer the O. B.'s take
on such an outcome.) Lest we be lulled into thinking that our current set of
politicos have utterlyoutdone
themselves in scaling the twin peaks of hilarity
and hypocrisy, we should take note of the Georgia Republicans who cast their proposal
to allow guns in churches as a means of
redressing wrongs done to black people in the Reconstruction era, when whites
bent on their re-subjugation sometimes burst into black churches (which were
seen as hotbeds of anti-white activism) bent on disarming any black person
found bearing a firearm.

State Rep. Dustin "Dusty" Hightower,
R-Carrollton, reportedly explained that allowing Georgians to worship with
pistols in their pockets and purses is really a civil rights issue:

"It [the prohibition against guns in churches] was placed
there to hinder people during the Jim Crow era. It was there to hinder
African-Americans from exercising their rights. This has no business to be
here. This is a true private property issue that was done under false pretenses
then and I think that's really the history of where that comes from and so
we're trying to simply say - we're trying to give that private property back to
where it deserves to be and let each individual private property owner make
that determination on their own."

This sudden surge of concern for
black rights among Georgia Republicans might be a bit more encouraging were it
not for the fact many of these folks who are now purportedly keen to make
amends for earlier efforts to deprive blacks of their Second Amendment rights
to bear arms are some of the same people working non-stop to throw up every
possible impediment to blacks exercising their Fifteenth Amendment rights to
cast a ballot. Along these lines, our good buddy Rep. Hightower pushed to allow the boundaries ofvoting
precincts to coincide with the boundaries of gated communities and to permit
placement of polling places in such communities which, even when unlocked, are
not noticeably welcomingenvironments for
minorities. He also voted to reduce unemployment benefits, co-sponsored a resolution
asking Governor Nathan Deal for "continued action for the protection of
Georgians from the unconstitutional federal Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act " and resisted efforts to expand Medicaid eligibility among
Georgia's poor. For good measure, ol' Dusty, the little people's new best
friend, was one of several Georgia legislators who actually called for the
repeal
of the Seventeenth Amendment,a move
that would strip voters of their right to choose their own U.S. senators and
return that prerogative to their always
friendly and sympathetic state legislators

Not
only is the truth often stranger than fiction, but it is sometimes so alternately funny
and frightening that you can forget it isn't fiction.As a mere chap, the O.B. heard the preacher light
into the congregation about the danger of laughing at sin. This hit pretty
close to home because even at that tender age, he had already concluded that
sin was frequently not only funny but fun it its own right.Although the O.B. and his pastor probably had
dramatically divergent views on what was
sin as well as what was funny, he does see now where the ol' Rev. was coming
from, at least.Finding too much
amusement in something you deplore can easily deaden your sense of what is
deplorable and smooth down feathers best left ruffled. William Faulkner once observed that "there's
not too fine a distinction between humor and tragedy."Both were tightly juxtaposed in much of his
fiction, but in the O.B.'s take, at least, Mr. Billy never let
the former blind the reader to the latter.

We
who reside in college towns are fond of saying they are great places to live
when the students aren't around, but, in fact, the welcome silence that signals
their departure would probably get to be as deafening as their presence if they
stayed away too long. Well, maybe not, but many of us would probably miss them
eventually, if only for the free entertainment they offer when at play. There
is a problem with way too much of that play, however, in that it is tied to a
distressingly high mortality and serious injury rate among middle-class youths
who should just be getting primed for the prime of their lives. There is quite
enough blame for this alarming trend to go around, but for now, a good portion
of it is being laid squarely at the beer-stained steps of college fraternity
houses. A recent blockbuster of an article/expose by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic draws on
a year's worth of research on "Greek houses" and promises to reveal "their
endemic, lurid, sometimes tragic problems--and a sophisticated system for
shifting the blame." Sadly enough, it delivers on all counts.

Flanagan suggests
that while fraternities had stood as essential pillars of privilege supporting the
very Establishment assailed by the shaggy sandal-shod student protestors of the
1960s and early 1970s, the iconic 1978 film "Animal House" signaled not only a resurgence
of frathood, but a dramatic reversal of how it was perceived as well. In short,
"Animal House" stripped the student impulse to rebel of its social and
ideological commitments and entanglements and redefined rebellion as the
slavish pursuit of personal-pleasure via outrageous, irresponsible, and
thoroughly self-indulgent behavior. Thanks in no small part to the student lefties
of the previous decade, the doctrine of inloco parentis was now toast, and the ensuing contraction of university supervision of collegians'
conduct left plenty of room for Freddy Frat to engage in all manner of socially
objectionable behavior Yet, for all of FF's vigor in exploiting these opportunities, theseemingly harmless antics served
up by "Animal House" managed to envelop frat-boy audacity in a disarming, guilt-and-consequence-free
bubble.

Curiously enough,
the kickoff exhibit for Flanagan's case actually evokes powerful memories of
the antics of "Bluto," "Otter," and their fellow Delta Tau Chi's. In Flanagan's
masterful retelling, one evening in May 2011, whilst on the deck of the ATO
house at Marshall University and "under the influence of powerful inebriants," one
Travis Hughes decided it would be "an excellent idea" to "shove a bottle rocket
up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air." Unfortunately, the influence
of the aforementioned inebriants apparently led young Mr. Hughes to "misjudge
the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability
of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of
a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole." More
unfortunately still, also at the scene was an only slightly less inebriated Louis
Helmburg III, a sub on the Marshall "Thundering Herd" baseball team, who, like
Hughes, was not actually affiliated with the brotherhood of ATO. Helmburg decided
to capture Hughes's daring exploit via cell-phone video and positioned himself
in what proved to be imprudent physical proximity to the actual launch pad, so
to speak. Thus it was that "when the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes's rectum,
Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men
from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he
staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck. Fortunately for him,
and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night's miseries, the deck was no
more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that
he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning
unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention." Helmburg's wounds
were sufficient to truncate his baseball season, and he filed suit against the
ATO national organization, the litigation of which would consume the next
thirty months before an out-of -court settlement was reached.

The
temptation to chuckle at this fiasco, which amounts to life-imitating art
(provided "Animal House" be art), is well nigh irresistible, much as it was
with the notorious "butt chugging" craze that swept across ol' Rocky Top a
while back. Yet, as Flanagan recounts vividly, the outcomes of such incidents
my turn out to be anything but funny. A case in point is that of Amanda
Andaverde, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Idaho, who had just
pledged Tri-Delt in August 2009. Andaverde and her sorority sisters kicked off
a night of drinking at the Sigma Chi house before moving on to SAE, where
additional libations and further loosened inhibitions led her to the third-floor
sleeping porch and onto the bunk of one Joseph Jody Cook. Attempting to roll
over in the middle of the night, Amanda fell twenty-five feet onto a cement
surface, suffering permanent brain damage that left her seriously impaired
physically. If this account were not sufficiently disconcerting, Flanagan
discovered that Amanda's was actually the second such fall from an upper story
of a University of Idaho fraternity house in a two-week period. Two months later
and only eight miles away at Washington State University, another student fell
from the third story of a frat house. Owing to their proximity, the two
campuses sustained a common student-party culture that was good for at least
three similarly serious falls from September through November 2012 alone.

If
you are thinking at this point that these terrible mishaps might be
geographically concentrated, think again. Flanagan quickly comes up with five more
such incidents in 2012, scattered cross-country from Berkeley to Ithaca, and
shows there were at least eight more coast to coast in the summer and fall of
2013. We have focused thus far only on serious accidents involving falls and
not the myriad examples of physical and sexual assaults or fatal or near-fatal
incidents of alcohol poisoning whose tracks converge at the frat house door.
Ironically enough, for all the ongoing furor over hazing, according to a 2010
survey represented in the accompanying graphic, it accounts for only 7 percent of the claims filed against fraternities
nationwide compared to the 9 percent triggered by falls from height, and more
worrisome still, hazing suits add up to less than half the share (15 percent)
of claims premised on sexual assault and less than a third of those (23
percent) involving assault and battery.

Overall, recent research by a pair of
Bloomberg writers shows that, at the very least, more than sixty people have
died in fraternity-related incidents since 2005.

It is small wonder, then, that liability
insurance became difficult for frats to come by at any price, beginning back in
the 1980s when industry experts named fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance
risk in the country, and individual insurers largely pulled their coverage en
masse. The upshot has been the formation of trust-like collective self-insurance
arrangements such as the Fraternal Information and Programming Group (FIPG),
which currently lists thirty-two national member fraternities. Other similarly specialized
coverage arrangements have emerged as well. In either case, it is important to
know that the bottom line for this sort of coverage amounts largely to limiting
the liability exposure of the national organization, and in actual practice, it
sometimes accomplishes that by actually transferring that exposure to members
of individual chapters where claims have arisen.

In particular,
chapters who do not pay for the liability limitation inherent in securing a
third-party vendor of alcohol at chapter events manage to facilitate drinking
by imposing what appear to be some highly unrealistic, even unworkable, event-management stratagems,
such as the "BYO-plan," (The general UGA version of which, as of 2008,at least,is described here.)
whereby members of drinking age, who may well represent a minority within the
group, are permitted to come to designated limited-attendance events bearing no
more than a six-pack of beer, which must then be tagged with the bearer's name
and doled out solely to him by fellow members who may or may not be of age
themselves. Sharing his brew even with brothers of legal drinking age puts Bubba Six-Pack
in violation of the fraternity's alcohol policy and should some injury or harm
come either to the recipient of his generosity or should said recipient cause
harm to others, poor Bubba can easily go from a cherished member of
the brotherhood to a toxic vulnerability in its midst. Should the failure of a
BYO or some similar protective system precede someone's injury or death, the
brothers are generally on orders to stay mum until the fraternity's insurance
interrogators arrive, at which time they are warmly encouraged to sing to these
ostensible guardians of their interests like meth-buzzed canaries on truth
serum, fully and candidly implicating themselves and others as violators of the
national organization's precisely worded and literally interpreted official
alcohol policies. If the anticipated damage suit materializes, these
unsuspecting lads who thought the fraternity's lawyers were supposed to be
defending them can find that, as far as the national organization is concerned,
the purportedly eternal benefits of brotherhood are now forfeit and the bonds
conferred by the secret handshake annulled, leaving them pretty much on their
lonesome to face the pitiless fire of the plaintiff's legal sharpshooters. The
ol' Bloviator has no way of knowing which fraternities might approach this
issue differently, but he does find Flanagan's research exhaustive and her general
conclusions persuasive. Hopefully, parents of fraternity members or of young
men who are about to be are already familiar with the organization in question's
procedures for handling such liabilities, but if not, close attention to the
following paragraph from Flanagan might be advisable:

"I've recovered millions and millions of
dollars from homeowners' policies," a top fraternal plaintiff's attorney told
me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict
policies are paid: from their parents' homeowners' insurance. As for the
exorbitant cost of providing the young man with a legal defense for the civil
case (in which, of course, there are no public defenders), that is money he and
his parents are going to have to scramble to come up with, perhaps transforming
the family home into an ATM to do it. The financial consequences of fraternity
membership can be devastating, and they devolve not on the 18-year-old "man"
but on his planning-for-retirement parents.

To see young men who
should be held "100 percent accountable for their actions . . . perhaps for the
first time in their lives," by the very outfit that seemed to offer tacit
assurances of four carefree years of self-indulgent irresponsibility is to
confront irony in its grimmest sense. The primary reason national fraternities have embraced such a byzantine
and deceptive C.Y.A. strategy comes
through in the observations of Douglas Fierberg, the nation's premier
plaintiff's attorney in "fraternity-related litigation," who contends that the
frat system is "the largest industry in this country directly involved in the
provision of alcohol to underage people." Sure enough, sifting through
"hundreds of fraternity incident reports," Flanagan could find not a single one
relating to "an event where massive amounts of alcohol weren't part of the
problem." (This suggests what a great idea it would be to plug firearms into
campus equation, don't you think?) The extent to which maximized access to
alcohol is likely to factor into any single seventeen- or eighteen-year-old
boy's decision to rush into fraternity
rush is clearly debatable, but the probability that it factors collectively in many such decisions most assuredly is not.
Thus, the possibility that a key factor in their attractiveness may someday
pose a serious threat to their survival led fraternities to adopt an effective,
if cold-blooded, strategy for minimizing or transferring the risk posed by
their alcohol-centric culture and existence.

Having
brutalized the Greek brotherhood nonstop thus far, however, it is not only
unfair but a downright cop out to leave them saddled with all of the blame for
the serious alcohol problems that are so blatantly obvious on so many college
campuses . It is utterly foolish to think that most freshmen are downing their
first gulp of beer after they hit campus, even if being there undeniably
expands their gulping opportunities, and that brings us to the matter of paternal
attitudes toward underage drinking. The O.B. has argued more than once that the
much-lamented "generation gap" said to have separated the youth of his era from
their Depression-reared, war-tested Moms and Dads would be infinitely
preferable to today's buddy-buddy, just-one-of-the-guys/girls parenting model,
which one strongly suspects in this case may appeal to the parents as a means
of reliving their college years vicariously through their kids. For example, the
Ol' Bloviator is both shocked and sorely dismayed to see so many of today's
parents not simply condoning but finding amusement in seeing their eighteen-year-olds
flashing fake IDs and generally plunging head-first into Lake Alcohol as if it
were in danger of drying up in the next few days, much less before they reach
21. He can't help but wonder how heartening such parents would find it to check
out the 2 a.m. scene when their over-indulged and definitely over-served freshmen
are staggering back toward what they hope is their dorm or, better yet, take stock
of their progeny as they drag themselves into an afternoon class still in possession
of a ten-ton hangover and smelling as if they had just gargled a forty-ounce Natty
Light. In some cases, even "parents'
weekends," which were once stilted and admittedly boring affairs fueled
primarily by fruit punch and stale cookies, are now lubricated by a steady
current of booze.

Although it is
rumored that Dean Noah recently contacted the Physics Dept. to see if gopher wood
will float on beer, the apparent reluctance of most campus administrators to
address this problem head-on may well arise from concerns about sending
negative vibes to youngsters whose relatively affluent backgrounds indicate
that the rising costs of being a collegian are likely to be no object to their
parents, who write checks for donations as well as fees. Meanwhile, those
parents, along with other alums, may also convince themselves that excessive
drinking is no bigger threat to student health or the university's educational mission
now than it was in their day. Take it from a grizzled, forty-year veteran who was
actually around back then and, after serving on six campuses, is still around
today, this university and the over whelming majority of its peer institutions
are awash in alcohol as never before. Trying to deny or downplay this grim
reality or duck the responsibility it conveys, is tantamount to whistling past
a graveyard, one, in this case, where an increasing number of occupants are unfortunately
and unnecessarily arriving way too early.

Bloviate:

"To orate verbosely and windily."

Bloviate is most closely associated with President Warren G. Harding, who used it frequently and was given to long winded speeches. H.L. Mencken said of Harding:

"He writes the worst English that I've ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the top most pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

Cobbloviate dedicates itself to maintaining the high standards established by President Harding and described so eloquently by Mr. Mencken. However,the bloviations recorded here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the mangement of Flagpole.com,nor,for that matter, are they very likely to be in accord with those of any sane, right-thinking individual or group anywhere in the known universe.